


our steps will always rhyme

by feralphoenix



Category: Little Busters!
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Polyamory, Spoilers, purity culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:02:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even with the hardest part over, Riki is still left with feelings of disconnect--with all the baggage he's internalized--to fight through.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our steps will always rhyme

**Author's Note:**

> _(A poem can begin with a lie_ – i don’t love you any less)

“Sometimes I think—”

Kyousuke turns over to him, gaze open and friendly, body all over scars. Like it always does, the urge to just hold Kyousuke’s face in his hands—make sure he’s really there—to touch every mark and worship them all—bowls Riki over in a wave and drags him into the undertow of love and fear and desire. His train of thought scrambles. His throat dries up and his words get lost.

 

 

(He doesn’t know how to explain it anyway. He is quite sure most of the time that he is the only one that ever feels this way.

And it’s not _fair_ of him to feel this way, because even though his memories of the “world where nothing happened” and all those repetitions are vague unless something specific pulls at them, he knows that it’s not like that for the rest. Even Rin remembers more than he does. It has to be so much more awkward for everyone else, and yet—

Maybe that’s why. Maybe that’s why it strikes him with such power and intensity when he walks out behind the baseball equipment room and he gets vivid sense memories of Kengo’s big gentle hands along his spine and what it felt like to have another boy in his mouth—when he is on the rooftop with Komari-san talking about nothing in particular and he’ll flash back to the way the sky looked that night during a loop where they were together, the giddy vertigo of being surrounded by nothing but stars and the way she sounded when she came—

Everyone else remembers these things all the time. It doesn’t make them act any differently around him. To the others it’s a fact of life.

And Riki doesn’t remember it clearly but he knows—he knows that there was a time that it was a fact of life to him too. That in the other world with its dreamlike logic, it was natural and ordinary that sex was just the next step in closeness with his friends. Sleeping with all of them was normal. Their sleeping with each other was _normal_.)

 

 

(It is _still_ normal—it is more than normal, it is _necessary,_ just another part of confirming to each other that they are here and alive and that this is really happening—this is why Riki is in Kyousuke’s room tonight, this is why Kengo is in his and Masato’s, this is why Rin sleeps over with different girls six nights out of every seven.

It’s just that they have to hide it here. It’s just that here in the real world they have to worry about things like protection, when it’s one of the boys with one of the girls. That scares Riki so much that he’s had to fight against his guilt and the rising panic to stay awake, when he’s been with Rin or Kud, and that is supposed to be a chapter of his life that he has ended.

It’s still _normal,_ but even though Riki does not usually feel any shame, he can feel exactly where the shame ought to go, the exact outlines in his mind and heart. Things like how it’s supposed to be improper for a boy to be intimate with more than one person, and bad for a boy to be intimate with other boys. Things like how girls are supposed to be pure and virginal and that if that’s true then Riki has ruined them somehow.

Most of him knows that these things aren’t true: Loving Kyousuke—loving Masato and Kengo too—these are some of the cleanest and best parts of him. The ways that the girls have changed comes from confronting their own inner demons, not from having sex, so it doesn’t make sense to think that they’ve lost anything, had something vital stolen from them.

But there’s still that one part that knows where the outlines of the shame he ought to have go, and keeps worrying them like a little kid with a loose tooth.

He thought that rescuing everyone from the bus explosion had been the hard part. Or at least that the hard part, the part where everyone will gradually grow apart from each other, is years away. But he’s struggling with the ambush of all these social standards, and it’s as difficult a battle as any he’s ever faced.)

 

 

“Riki?”

Kyousuke is looking at him, beetling his brow. Riki takes a deep breath.

“Sometimes I think that—that being in the other world was easier,” he says. He doesn’t know how to put the rest into words. He doesn’t want to. He’s afraid to, a little.

But Kyousuke narrows his eyes like he can see right through Riki. Being Kyousuke, he probably can.

So Riki reaches out very deliberately to hold Kyousuke’s face in both hands. He wills himself to be conscious of the way that he and Kyousuke are as naked with each other right now as two people could ever be. That this is a good thing. Even if no one outside the Little Busters is willing to understand it as good.

When Riki leans in to kiss Kyousuke, it is just as mindful and deliberate an action as it was to go back to the bus, or to push back against his narcolepsy. He isn’t running away. _He’s fighting back._


End file.
